Packs management

This technical preview is made available to customers free of charge for their evaluation and feedback. On general availability the functionalities of the preview may be subject to additional cost and/or licensing. As such, the technical preview, the documentation, and any updates are provided for limited evaluation only and on an “as-is” and “as-available” basis without warranty of any kind.

Packs allow to use a single Nexthink environment to group content items based on related functionality and distribute content with ease to Nexthink users in other environments, including:

One-click installation
Automatic notification of available updates
One-click updates

Accessing packs

Select Administration from the main menu.
Click Packs in the navigation panel under the Content Management section.

If no menu entries appear, ensure your profile has the proper permissions. Refer to the Permissions documentation for more information.

Managing packs

The Packs administration page lists all custom packs organized in a table.

Hover over each pack to reveal the action menu on the right side of the table. The action menu options are:

Edit: Configure the pack.
Delete: Remove the pack.
Publish: Release the current version of the pack in a way that is shareable with other Nexthink instances. See the Publishing packs section below for more details.
View history: Show the release history of the pack. The following is listed for each version of the pack:
- Pack version
- The date of publication
- The account the version was published by
- The release notes associated with the version

Copy reference: Copy the pack reference to share it with those who need to import the pack in other Nexthink environments.

Creating a new pack

Click New Pack to open the Draft page where you can add and configure packs.

Fill in the fields under Create a new pack:
- Name: Enter a unique name that identifies the pack.
- Description: Enter a meaningful description of the pack.
Select the content type from the drop-down menu. Search for the name of the pack to narrow down the results.
- Select the content items to include in the pack.
- Tags attached to the content are exported as part of the pack.

Only custom content is displayed in the list. It is not possible to re-package content that has been installed from the Library.

Please be cautious when exporting and sharing contents linked to another Technical Preview. Attempting to install such a pack in a tenant without an active Technical Preview may lead to installation failure.

Click the Load more button to load more content.
- Click Save to finish creating the pack or Cancel to terminate the process.

In the 2024.9 release the following content types are available for selection:

Applications
Checklists
Ratings
Live dashboards
Custom fields
Campaigns
Remote Actions
Investigations
Custom trends

Publishing packs

Use the publication option to release the current version of the pack in a way that is shareable with other Nexthink instances. This option is available from the action menu for all packs with unpublished changes.

A pack may have unpublished changes if:

It is a newly created pack that has never been published before. These packs show Current published version = 0.
The pack has been edited by modifying the pack name, description or list of contents.
A content item that is referenced in the pack has been edited.

Optionally, add release notes associated to the current version of the custom library pack.

After initial publication, the system associates a reference to the pack. Access the reference at the moment of publication using the Copy reference button, or later using the Copy reference option in the right-hand menu. The reference is needed to import the pack into other environment.

Permissions

To enable proper permissions for custom pack administration:

Select Administration from the main menu.
Click Roles from the navigation panel.
Click on the New Role button in the top-right corner of the page to create a new role, or edit an existing role by hovering over it and clicking on the edit icon to change the role configuration.
In the Permissions section, scroll down to Library and packs and enable Manage all custom packs to allow users to create, edit, delete and publish custom packs.

Cross-tenant permissions

In order to restrict the list of environments that can consume custom packs, communicate the following information to Nexthink:

Source environment: The single Nexthink environment from which packs are created and published.
Consumer environments: The list of Nexthink environments that are allowed to import packs published from the source environment.

Limitations

Description

Workaround/plans

Filtering on tags is not possible in the pack selection screen.

Further development planned for a later release.

The following scenario is not supported in the source environment:

Deleting content that is included in a published pack
Recreating content with the same NQL ID
Adding new content to a pack

This is not supported. Once content is referenced in a pack, it should not be deleted. If deletion is required, a new pack should be created to accommodate it.

Exporting pack information (name, description, current version, reference...) to file is not supported.

Further development is under consideration for a later release. Until then, you must create custom release notes manually.